by Rea Amit
translated by Rea Amit
Rea Amit: Hiroko, many consider you to be a representative of contemporary Japanese fiction. While you clearly write in the Japanese language, your works that have been translated into English appear to lack a specific sense of place or time. How do you situate the environment in your fiction within the context of contemporary Japan?
| Haruki Murakami |
This past weekend in Japan, Haruki Murakami released his new story collection Ichininshō Tansū (The First Person Singular). The collection comprises eight stories, seven of which were first published in the literary magazine Bungakukai between summer 2018 and winter 2020. Many of these first-person stories are narrated by what feels like an older version of the “boku” first-person narrators of Murakami’s early stories and novels. Some of the narrators have clearly been crafted to resemble Haruki Murakami himself (a technique he famously deployed early in his career when he wrote the stories included in his 1985 collection Kaiten Mokuba no Deddo Hiito). Several stories in this new collection have already been made available in English translation in the New Yorker and Granta, and Philip Gabriel’s translation of the entire book is scheduled to be published in April 2021.